Filed under: All Linguistics Themes, Historical Linguistics, Language-specific, Morphology, Phonology, Semantics, Syntax
Many of you language geeks may have heard of the (relatively new) World Atlas of Language Structures, a project carried out primarily by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
The volume, which has maps of linguistic features (a relative first) including word order, morphological features and more, has proven a bit pricy. Not anymore, however: the entire work is now available online for FREE! It’s even better than pie and chips.
Give it a look at http://www.wals.info/.
Technorati Tags: language, typological classification
If you’re like me, your penmanship is horrible.
As a consequence, I type everything, which meant two things when doing linguistics assignments:
• I had to find fonts that contained APA or IPA phonological characters.
• I had to learn keystrokes to use those fonts.
Luckily, I use Macintosh, which lets you use the “American Extended” keyboard layout to type, allowing the use of APA/IPA characters and diacritics to get the job done. However, when I started this site, I came up with another question: is it possible to show phonetic characters in HTML, and if so, how?
Luckily, I soon found this site, which lists most phonetic characters and how to display them using Unicode. Thanks to the listing, I can do this:
[ɛksəlɛnʔ] !!!
Filed under: Language-specific, Phonology, Sociolinguistics | Tags: nevada, politics, pronunciation
With the Nevada caucus approaching in two days, I noticed something interesting while listening to political chatter: Nevadans don’t like people who mispronounce the name of their state.
A caller made a comment on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” concerning the pronunciation of “Nevada”, and how Nevadans joke that Americans from the east coast constantly mispronounce it.
I got to thinking: I wonder if Nevadans subconsciously think less of political candidates who pronounce their state “the east coast way.” This pronunciation could be approximated thus:
[nɛvaɾə]
Of course, if you say it that way, then (supposedly) Nevadans won’t like you. Instead, try it like this:
[nəvæɾə]
Luckily, being from California, I pronounce it “correctly.” Who’d have thought that an ɑ and a schwa would mean so much?
